Range Partitioning is an interesting feature that was introduced in IBM DB2® brand computer software version 9 (registered mark of International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, N.Y., USA)(“IBM”). Table partitioning (sometimes referred to as range partitioning) is a data organization scheme in which table data is divided across multiple storage objects, called data partitions, according to values in one or more table columns. These partitions are completely transparent to the applications. That is, applications can continue to access data by specifying column and table names, and do not need to “worry” about which data partition(s) the data resides in.
U.S. Patent Publication No. 2002-0194157 of Zait et al. discloses partition pruning with composite partitioning. Specifically, the Zait publication discloses techniques for expanding the concept of partitioning in variety of ways. In particular techniques are provided for performing multiple-dimension partitioning. In multiple-dimension partitioning, a database object is divided into partitions based on one criterion, and each of those resulting partitions is divided into sub-partitions based on a second criterion. The process of partitioning partitions based on different criteria may be repeated across any number of dimensions. Entirely different partitioning techniques may be used for each level of partitioning. The database server takes advantage of partitions when processing queries by selectively accessing a subset of partitions on disk or reducing the number of internal join operations.